think I shall go on a little farther. We two have climbed together; maybe
we shall go on yet, side by side."

For the heart of labouring womanhood cries out today to the man who would
suggest she need not seek new fields of labour, that child-bearing is
enough for her share in life's labour, "Do you dare say to us now, that we
are fit to do nothing but child-bear, that when that is performed our
powers are exhausted? To us, who yet through all the ages of the past,
when child-bearing was persistent and incessant, regarded it hardly as a
toil, but rather as the reward of labour; has our right hand lost its
cunning and our heart its strength, that today, when human labour is easier
and humanity's work grows fairer, you say to us, 'You can do nothing now
but child-bear'? Do you dare to say this, to us, when the upward path of
the race has been watered by the sweat of our brow, and the sides of the
road by which humanity has climbed are whitened on either hand by the bones
of the womanhood that has fallen there, toiling beside man? Do you dare
say this, to us, when even today the food you eat, the clothes you wear,
the comfort you enjoy, is largely given you by the unending muscular toil
of woman?"

As the women of old planted and reaped and ground the grain that the
children they bore might eat; as the maidens of old spun that they might
make linen for their households and obtain the right to bear men; so,
though we bend no more over grindstones, or labour in the fields, or weave
by hand, it is our intention to enter all the new fields of labour, that we
also may have the power and right to bring men into the world. It is our
faith that the day comes in which not only shall no man dare to say, "It is
enough portion for a woman in life that she bear a child," but when it will
rather be said, "What noble labour has that woman performed, that she
should have the privilege of bringing a man or woman child into the world?"